Who Owns the Arctic?

Melting Arctic brings new opportunities

Changing conditions in the far north have sparked excitement and unfounded concerns over potential conflict.

Michael Byers, Al Jazeera.com , December 22, 2011

Vancouver, Canada - "For the first time in my life, I'm trying to find ice."

Alex MacIntyre was standing on the bridge of the Akademik Ioffe as the Russian-flagged ice-strengthened cruise ship traversed the Northwest Passage last summer. A Canadian ice-pilot with four decades of Arctic experience, MacIntyre remembers when the route was choked with sea-ice that was 10 to 15 metres thick.

Twenty-two ships sailed through the Northwest Passage in 2011. On the other side of the Arctic Ocean, 34 ships traversed Russia's Northern Sea Route.

The Arctic Ocean, which exists in a precarious balance between ice and water, is more susceptible to climate change than anywhere else on Earth. A so-called "feedback loop" exacerbates the situation: As climate change warms the air and melts the highly reflective ice from above, it exposes more dark ocean water which acts like a solar sponge, absorbing more energy from the sun and melting the remaining ice from below.

For the full text, see: Melting Arctic brings new opportunities

Canada boosts claim to Northwest Passage

Bernard Simon, Financial Times, May 11, 2011

A plan to open up northern Quebec to resource development will help bolster Canada’s disputed claims to the Northwest Passage, according to Jean Charest, premier of the French-speaking province.

“With global warming, a northern route is going to open up just on the tip of northern Quebec by 2030 or 2040,” Mr Charest told the Financial Times.

The Investigator belongs in Ottawa

The newly discovered Arctic exploration vessel is an important part of this nation's history -- it should be displayed in the capital

Michael Byers, Ottawa Citizen, July 30,2010

Museums in Oslo and Vancouver house two of the three ships that were central to the history of Canada's Northwest Passage. With this week's discovery of the HMS Investigator, almost perfectly preserved in the cold waters of Mercy Bay, Northwest Territories, Ottawa should soon become the home of the third.

Northerners eyeing new riches

Oil, gas, gold, uranium. Immense wealth is there for the taking — if we could get it out of there. Global warming can make that happen

Ed Struzik, Toronto Star, November 24, 2007

CAPE CHURCHILL, Man.–Two polar bears cautiously approach each other on the fresh sea ice off the coast of Hudson Bay.

Just before the bears meet, they stand and dance around one another. Then they lock up like a pair of Sumo wrestlers, stand back, then start swatting each other. Vicious as it looks, all these young males are doing is playing.

With me watching the scene is John Gunter, marketing director of Frontiers North, the tundra buggy/adventure tour company that brought me out here with Robert Buchanan, the head of Polar Bear International, a non-profit conservation group. In the long, economically troubled history of Churchill, polar bears, Polar Bear International and adventure tour companies like Frontiers North have been the only steady sources of income for this closely knit community of 1,000 Inuit, Cree, Metis and non-native residents.

The Race for the Arctic

As the ice melts, nations eye oil and gas deposits and shipping routes

Thomas Omestad, U.S. News & World Report, October 13, 2008

A new epoch is beginning at the top of the Earth, where the historic melting of the vast Arctic ice cap is opening a forbidding, beautiful, and neglected swath of the planet. Already, there is talk that potentially huge oil and natural gas deposits lie under the Arctic waters, rendered more accessible by the shrinking of ice cover. Valuable minerals, too. Sea lanes over the top of the world will dramatically cut shipping times and costs. Fisheries and tourism will shift northward. In short, the frozen, fragile north will never be the same.